Pale Ire

In his long-awaited memoir, Morrissey sheds his wilting-wallflower image

Simon Reynolds

Autobiography

by Morrissey

$30.00 List Price

In “Pretty Girls Make Graves,” off the Smiths’ 1983 self-titled debut album, Morrissey bemoans the advances of a voracious woman: “But she’s too rough, and I’m too delicate.” That’s how the world has tended to see the singer: the prince of mope rock, someone who speaks for life’s wilting wallflowers, the easily bruised and eternally unrequited. From his fey, sighing vocals, often spiraling up into a genderless falsetto, to lyrics that express the erotic ascetic yearnings of someone with “no understanding of himself as flesh,” most of Morrissey’s best songs fit this image of bookish, bedroom-cloistered sensitivity.

Yet something odd becomes apparent as you make your way through Autobiography, the fifty-four-year-old singer’s best-selling new memoir. Yes, Morrissey sings on behalf of those brutalized by the world

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